Spatial domain intra mode prediction an important tool in advanced video coding standards such as H.264 and AVS which improve coding efficiency over older standards. The H.264 intra prediction allows three modes, intra 16×16 (I16×16), intra 8×8 (I8×8) and intra 4×4 (I4×4) based on the prediction block size. For a predictive frame the encoder decides to encode a macroblock in the intra mode when motion estimation and the inter mode prediction fail to find a good match from the reference frame. The encoder computes a measure of similarity for both the best intra prediction mode and the best inter prediction mode. This measure of similarity is often the sum of absolute differences (SAD). The encoder then selects the mode with minimum SAD (best similarity). The computation of SAD for best intra prediction mode is not trivial and requires several arithmetic operations to search through all the allowed intra prediction modes. When using dedicated memory based hardware architecture with different hardware accelerators for intra mode and inter mode prediction, there will be additional transfer of data from external memory to hardware accelerator internal memory to compute intra prediction SAD. Switching off intra mode search completely results in noticeable video quality artifacts. Thus there is a need in the art to reduce the computational complexity and data transfer needs of intra prediction.